The Crying Book by Heather Christle review – why do we weep?

What makes you cry? Recently I cried when my eldest daughter won a medal in a gymnastics competition; during a conversation with my wife; and while watching the films Marriage Story; Do the Right Thing; and, less explicably, Unstoppable, in which Denzel Washington pursues a runaway train. On the morning I began writing this review, I watched Green MEP Molly Scott Cato’s farewell speech to the European parliament. She started crying and then so did I.

These films, conversations and speeches were all things that were happening while I cried, but saying precisely which aspects of them triggered my tears, and why, is more difficult. This is one of the areas the poet Heather Christle explores in The Crying Book, her investigation into the physical, cultural and political aspects of crying. “Maybe we cannot know the real reason why we are crying,” she writes. “Maybe we do not cry about, but rather near or around. Maybe all our explanations are stories constructed after the fact. Not just stories. I won’t say just.”

Christle’s quotation-heavy style awards art at least equal status to science in trying to map the world of tears. She engages with several scientific investigations of crying and “the human lacrimal system”, but as far as she’s concerned, a Frank O’Hara poem about crying naked in the bath is as valid as a clinical study.

She is good on the ugliness of crying, describing the way a proper cry makes people “hideous, as if they’ve grown a spare and diseased face beneath the one you know”. She considers crying’s moral ugliness, too, writing that white women’s tears can be “subject to specific scrutiny, because their weaponisation has so often meant violence toward people of colour, and black people in particular … They set others falling to help her, to correct and punish those who would dare make her weep”. She illustrates this with a powerful account of the murder of an innocent black man by white police in an Ohio Walmart.

One of the most fascinating characters Christle describes is the Dutch conceptual artist Bas Jan Ader (not Danish-born, as the book claims). In his film, I’m Too Sad to Tell You, Ader cries in front of the camera, but what he is crying for (or perhaps “near or around”) remains mysterious. Christle, however, finds a statement Ader later made about the film. “When I cried,” he said, at once open and enigmatic, “it was because of extreme grief.”

Ader’s 1975 work, In Search of the Miraculous, began with the artist walking the night-time streets of Los Angeles with a torch, searching for some unknown person or object. “For the second instalment,” Christle writes, “Ader planned to sail across the Atlantic Ocean in a small sailboat by himself, having been seen off by a group of his art students singing sea shanties. The third instalment was to be another series of night-wandering photographs, this time in Amsterdam, but Ader disappeared during his sea voyage, and so the final piece of the triptych remains potential, conceptual, unexecuted.”

This work of Ader’s – a mysterious search and a journey that doesn’t reach its destination – is something like the experience of reading The Crying Book. The broad range of her inquiry, which can move from Donald Trump (“‘I’m not a big crier’”) to Byzantine lycanthropy in the space of a sentence, is one of the book’s primary pleasures. But its scattershot nature disrupts the through-line it also wants to develop. Interspersing its impersonal elements (facts, trivia, anecdotes involving famous actors and thinkers) are episodes from Christle’s own life: being dumped in college, an abortion, a friend’s suicide, getting pregnant and the experience of motherhood. Accompanying her throughout all this is the waxing and waning moon that Christle calls her “despair”. She favours that word, she explains, because “depression and suicidal ideation and anxiety all cast a staged or laboratory light”, which seems to be both a confession and a withholding. This doubleness is problematic; a fault line at the heart of her book.

Her episodes of despair seem significant. They leave her “sobbing on the bathroom floor”, render her incapable of performing basic tasks, and have, two asides suggest, brought her close to suicide. The fragmentary approach she favours – which allows her inquiry to dart this way and that, like Ader’s torch beam on a dark LA street – means she can alight on the personal and then quickly retreat into cultural history, science, or poetry.

Anyone who has read Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, which The Crying Book resembles in both its structure (each paragraph is set apart from its neighbours, in what Nelson has called a “faux-Wittgenstenian form”) and in certain of its interests (pregnancy, lactation, exhaustion, Judith Butler), will know how powerful this approach can be, with fragments cohering as the book progresses, like iron filings unified by a magnet. In The Crying Book, the fragments mostly stay scattered. In its closing pages she quotes, a little defensively, from Anne Carson’s poem “Uncle Falling” – “How light, how loose, how unprepared is the web of connections between any thought and any thought” – and expresses her doubts about the book: “I have been afraid all the connections are wrong. And I also have not known how to stop.” The Crying Book is interesting enough that Christle needn’t feel anxious about its fragmentation. But the one serious cost of its diffuseness is that its autobiographical elements – particularly those concerning Christle’s “despair” – occupy an emotional no man’s land.

In the preface to his 1985 book Crying: The Mystery of Tears, William Frey, with whom Christle corresponds in The Crying Book, wrote that: “I hope this book will help place crying in its proper perspective as a normal human response to emotional stress.” Christie offers no such “proper perspective”, but as a selector of unusual, arresting details, she is exceptional. Everyone who reads her book will find something that stays with them, which for me turns out to be a line from the Argentinian writer Julio Cortázar’s Instructions for Crying, which I haven’t been able, or particularly wanted, to get out of my head: picture, he suggests, a patch of water “into which no one sails ever”.

• The Crying Books is published by Corsair (RRP £14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15.